A banner saying ‘Truth for Giulio’ in front of Saint Peter’s basilica during the Rome marathon in April.
Photograph: Angelo Carconi/EPA

A senior Italian official has lambasted Cambridge University for allegedly failing to cooperate in the investigation of the murder of Giulio Regeni, a doctorate student who was brutally tortured and murdered in Egypt.

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The comments by Mario Giro, who has accused the elite British university of not cooperating and seeking only to protect itself, represents a significant escalation in tensions between Italy and Cambridge, which has insisted it was doing everything it could to assist authorities in the investigation into the murder of one of its students.

Giro, Italy’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, took an unusually candid swipe at Cambridge on Twitter on Friday, writing in English: “Shame on you … you value more your ‘secret researches’ than a human life. What are you hiding? TRUTH FOR #giulioregeni”.

Asked to explain his remarks, Giro told the Guardian in an email that he had been “astonished” by the university’s “negative response” to the recent request by the chief prosecutor in Rome for more information about Regeni’s studies in Egypt, where the young Italian researcher was investigating labour unions, a politically sensitive topic.

Regeni disappeared on 25 January and his body was discovered in a ditch outside Cairo more than a week later. He had been severely tortured and mutilated. The murder which many, including top Italian officials, believe occurred at the hands of the Egyptian state, caused outrage in Italy and for months has strained ties between Italy’s government under prime minister Matteo Renzi and Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.

While the tensions with Egypt have been the focal point of press reports in Italy, questions about Cambridge’s actions have been simmering for months.

Politicians and commentators have blamed the British university for not doing enough to protect a talented academic researcher who was at risk because of Egypt’s instability and poor record on human rights. They have also insisted that universities around the world should do more to protect their students.

“I was convinced – considering all the meetings held there on this case – that the university authorities would be helpful in searching the truth about Giulio. What we received is a bureaucratic response through which the university seems trying only to protect itself. I don’t know from what,” Giro wrote in his email to the Guardian.

“This is very upsetting. They seem not interested in the truth, not concerned about Giulio’s death. Some of them rejecting the responsibility on other universities … absurd behaviour,” he added. Asked what specifically he believed Cambridge had done wrong, he responded: “I don’t know. The only clear thing, sadly, is that they are not really cooperating. Here everybody is asking why.”

In a statement last week, Cambridge insisted that it had not received any request from Italian prosecutors on the case. “The university remains ready to react quickly to any request for assistance from the Italian authorities,” a spokesman said.

But it has also contradicted its own statement. The university has acknowledged that one academic did receive a request from prosecutors, which she had received shortly before a memorial service dedicated to Regeni. “She has already been interviewed by the Italian police and is in the process of responding to their questions in writing,” the university said last week.

“I’m not going to add anything to the statement I sent a week ago at this time,” a spokesman said on Friday.

Cambridge also said two university officials – David Runciman, head of Polis, the department of politics and international studies, and Susan Smith of Girton College – had written to the Egyptian consul general in London and the British ambassador in Egypt, to convey the university’s sense of shock and asked to be kept informed of the investigation.